Thank you for the words and prayers Rick. I'm a believer though I don't attend these days. Not sure that I've been to a service in 20 years. You mentioned being a catholic, but going to a Baptist church. I actually grew in the Baptist church, dad did too. He and his mother were actually founding members of the church I attended back then. One of the reasons I kind of left was that I didn't agree with the path the money in the church thought they wanted to take. They seemed to want to grown it into a mega church. Well not actually a mega church, but into something much larger than it was. What made that church what it was was the small size and family atmosphere that it would have lost. Fortunately that never happened, but I'd already somewhat moved out of the area.
Friday night and Saturday morning I was actually thinking I would stay over and go to Sunday service with mom this morning. After all of the people at and after the service, I was peopled out and didn't want to be around anyone today. Perhaps once things have settled back down a bit.
Yes, they are! I want to say around 2016 dad bought a 30(ish) horse 4wd LS tractor with bucket. I recall him saying on more than one ocasion that it was too handy not to have one and he wanted something that would be here for us to use later. He had a Yanmar before that, pretty certain it is still back there too, but it was a pain to keep running. The tractor was one of the things dad left behind that mom kind of wonders what to do with because she won't use it. I definitely let her know that it wasn't going anywhere.
Know that he had a couple of decks for it. One or two brush hog decks, I think he got one with it and had another from the Yanmar. Finish mower deck, box blade, harrow, and other stuff. A grapple to replace the bucket. Don't know where all of it is at at the moment, some at their house, some at the huning club. Certainly not going anywhere, and once the weather cools off some of it is coming out to my place to clean up the property.
Now off to bed for a few hours and see if I can stand to deal with people when I get into work.
Couple thoughts on religion, which is different than faith, and attending services.
Religion and churches are run by man (men and women). Obviously the intent should be to promote the Lord’s work. Man was created in the image of the Lord, but man is a sinner and imperfect. We have egos, we have opinions, we are influenced by who knows what. So the religion and the churches almost would have to be imperfect as we are.
The Catholic Church is very very regimented. If you think back, the Catholic Church, for all intents and purposes, was the government over a great portion of the Earth for a long time. In addition to promoting the Lord’s work, they had the responsibility, or should I say, they took the responsibility, to keep people in line. I don’t want to imply that’s malicious at all, if done right, it is for the benefit of all, and is part of God’s work.
Fast forward to the time of instant global information availability, everybody has their own government, and we are bombarded all day long to be great consumers, but we’re not doing it right if we’re not bigger and more shiny than our neighbor. That happens to churches too, because they are run by man.
Again, I still consider myself a catholic. And in that faith, there are rules, just as we have a constitution. The 10 Commandments, the sacraments, etc., are the rules. Then we have the college of Cardinals and the pope. That’s like the Congress in the president. We can adjust the original teachings just as Congress can implement amendments to the constitution. Enough on that, you get the analogy.
Having said all of that, faith and religion and belief are very very personal. The politics in the Catholic Church became a little extreme to me when I was younger, and I left the church, but I never left my faith nor did it ever leave me. Now that I’m older and I understand how a lot of stuff works, I’m starting to understand why the church had to be regimented over all the decades and centuries.
As far as where I go on Sunday morning, and I don’t make it every time, it’s not necessarily where I go, it’s why I go. I think it is very important to our faith, but also to our family and to everything we do, if we step back for an hour or two on a regular basis and reflect on just about everything, but certainly the good and the bad in our lives, and what we have to adjust.
I like churches with excellent music. The 10 or 15 minutes of music is an excellent buffer to remove me from the day-to-day world, or even the bad traffic getting to church, and to adjust my thinking at the moment to be receptive to whatever message, and to reflect on what I mentioned above. One thing I like about the Baptist teaching from the Bible, which I also like about Buddha and Confucius, is the message and how it is delivered. I believe that God believes that we should get the message and we should practice the message, practice the Lord‘s work, but how we receive that message isn’t that critical. But we should not only receive it, we should prepare to receive it, and we should seek it out, and then we should put it to use, good use.
I’ve attended services where I don’t like the music. It’s a distraction and it doesn’t prepare me to evaluate things. It’s probably very arrogant, but there’s one wonderful church in Atlanta where I don’t like the people who attend. They strike me as busy and superficial, going to that church to show off Again, not bad people, they’re just different than me, but it interferes with the reason I am there. I could go on, but my point is when I go to those locations, it does not place me in a relaxed, safe environment, where I can focus on the message and reflect on my life and my actions.
Are the churches I do attend perfect? Of course, not, they’re just like me. But I go to them because I can block out the distractions and focus on the reason I am there. And the pastors have the right methods and words to help me absorb the message. And I want to emphasize the “I.” I go to church to praise the Lord and thank him for his blessings and to seek his help for conducting my life. It’s a personal and very selfish thing.
Hence, I would encourage all to take that inspirational one or two hour trip away from daily life to thank Him for our blessings, ask His inspiration and help, and to re-organize our own thinking for the next week and going forward.
I strongly considered putting this in a PM to you, but I think it’s a message for all. Doesn’t have much to do with trucks, but I have found most in TRS to be very good people, who hopefully will be encouraged by something like this, and it may help them focus a little tiny bit more on faith, I certainly don’t see a bad side to it. So forgive me for being a teacher and preacher for a moment, and remember, as always, it’s just my two cents.
Welcome Visitor! Please take a few seconds and 
woke up ready to make progress and definitely just made a bunch of opposite progress.. what's the word for that? Oh yeah CONgress 
ha.
